Rossellini: Proud To Be Past 50
Isabella Rossellini's beauty has made her one of the world's most recognizable women.
The actress, now 52, tells The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith she not only didn't mind passing the 50 mark, she was and is proud of it.
"I think they always talk about how difficult it is for women to grow old," Rossellini says. "I have a friend who wrote a wonderful book that is coming out, Carol Levine. The book is coming out in January, and Carol did a survey. And most women feel terribly liberated.
"It's the time that your children are grown up, that your husband either is gone -- because you got rid of him -- or the marriage is now completely solid and successful. And it's a moment for women to do what they really want to do."
Rossellini says she doesn't even care about her looks anymore: "You're liberated even in the sense that you always have to please, please and be pretty. (But) at a certain point, you say, 'Well, I am who I am and that's it,' you know?"
Part of who she is: She's Ingrid Bergman's daughter. She says she thinks it's interesting for her to see the way young people today relate to her mother.
"I think sometimes not the entire film, but that last scene of 'Casablanca,' with Humphrey Bogart at the airport, has become like an iconic image. So sometimes when I say to a young person, 'My mom is Ingrid Bergman, the one in "Casablanca," ' you still see a gaze of, 'Who?' (So I say) 'You know, the scene with Humphrey Bogart, in black and white, at the airport?' 'Oh, that's your mom?' "
In her latest project, she stars as the high priestess Thar in the SciFi Channel miniseries "Earthsea," based on a series of award-winning books.
She told Smith she agreed to the role largely because one of the executive producers is Robert Halmi, with whom she'd worked a half-dozen times before. She says, "He called me up and he said, 'I have a script for you. And you have to give me the answer in two days.' The script arrived. I saw this huge thing, this huge volume. I said, 'There's no way I could do it in two days -- so my answer is yes.' And that's it."